Adding some version of the legendary William Shatner would enhance all sorts of computer amusements.

From his 1961 role as a progressive young schoolteacher bringing straight talk about sex to small-town America in The Explosive Generation, through his hunky turn as old-timey secret agent Jeff Cable in Barbary Coast, to his current world-beating tour-de-force as “William Shatner,” William Shatner has built up a William Shatner that is this generation’s William Shatner.

Yes, Shatner has made an indelible mark on film, television and popular music, but one corner of culture has yet to feel more than the slightest brush of his hand: video games. With the exception of a few Star Trek titles, the Stratford alumnus has been absent from the medium. Join me now as we imagine that lapse rectified, a world where William Shatner’s greatest roles meet the interactive medium . . .

There’s a lot of similarities between T. J. Hooker and the hero of 1987 cop-drama adventure Police Quest. Both Hooker and Sonny Bonds are 15-year veterans of policing in sunny, seamy, southern California. T. J. is divorced, and his surname is Hooker; Bonds eventually marries, and his wife was a hooker. It’s eerie, really.

But Sonny Bonds is kind of a drab guy; his only remarkable features are the way he walks really slowly even if he’s being chased or otherwise pressed for time, and his habit of stuffing his pockets with everything around him not nailed down. T. J. Hooker, on the other hand, has personality to spare: driven, tough, warmhearted, athletic . . . I like to think the only reason they didn’t digitize Shatner’s iconic cop into Police Quest was that ’80s technology could not cope with the total sweetness of Hooker’s hood-slides.

Silent Hill is a scary game, what with all the fog and the cults and the bloody walls and the knife-wielding burlap-wrapped children and all, but you’d hardly know it from the reactions of protagonist Harry Mason. Now and then he manages to twist his polygons into something resembling terror, but most of the time he just plods around in the mist, begging to be devoured by flayed dogs.

Shatner, on the other hand, knows how to generate fear and deliver it wholesale through a television screen, as he proved in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” in the role of a guy who sees a gremlin on the wing of his airliner and totally wigs out. Seriously, that is a grade-A wig-out, right there. A little bit of that Shatner magic would have brought a touch of electricity to Silent Hill . . . Lord knows that dimly lit village could use it.

Shatner picked up a couple Emmys for his portrayal of brilliant, egotistical, dementia-stricken lawyer Denny Crane of The Practice and Boston Legal, and one can’t help but imagine what might have been had that character replaced fumbling rookie Phoenix Wright in this surreal courtroom-drama-adventure series.

Now, I like Wright just fine, but Denny Crane is a whole other league. Where Wright’s signature phrase is “OBJECTION!” (that’s actually every lawyer’s signature phrase in the game’s bizarro legal system), Crane’s is his own freakin’ name. The cases in Phoenix Wright are loaded with obvious lies and travesties of justice, and it would be so satisfying to cut through all the BS with one sharp, succinct “Denny Crane!” Maybe followed up by a gentler, but still firm confirmation: “Denny Crane.”

This one is a no-brainer. I’d hate to take work away from Edmonton actor Mark Meer, who provides the voice of Mass Effect’s male Commander Shepard, but anyone can see that replacing Shep with Shatner’s Captain Kirk would instantly improve an already excellent game. The fact Mass players are constantly making tough, often contradictory ethical choices plays right to Kirk: the guy’s an unpredictable loose cannon, recklessly irresponsible and insubordinate one minute, by-the-book moral paragon the next.

And as for Mass Effect’s sorta-controversial human-on-alien sexy-space-romance plotlines . . . you know who Captain Kirk is, right? They’d have to press another disc just to hold all of James T’s astro-romps — and also program a special hazy-focus filter for the graphics engine. The biggest concession in getting Kirk into Mass Effect, though, would be redesigning the bridge of the starship Normandy; Kirk’s contract expressly calls for a chair with toggle-switches on the armrests.

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